The paper describes an innovative methodology developed as part of a major “mixed methods” collaborative and multidisciplinary research project across several Latin American cities. It offers a systematic “hands-on” methodology about how to conduct multi-disciplinary and team-based intensive case studies of low-income household dynamics and trajectories in self-help dwelling structures in (now) consolidated low-income settlements of Latin America. The research project describes how to collect information about family genealogies, household organization and individual member mobility, tied to materials that allow for the construction of detailed housing plans and architectonic diagrams resulting from self-building in informal settlements over a thirty-year period. The majority of the original “owner” self-builders still reside in these (now) consolidated properties, and the methodology provides for cross generational analysis of household behavior in relation to the dynamics of dwelling construction and use of space, household organization, inheritance and heirship.

UN-Habitat (2006). State of the World’s Cities 2006/7. The Millennium, Development Goals and Urban Sustainability: 30 Years Shaping the Habitat Agenda, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Earthscan Publications Ltd., London and Sterling.

Ward, P. M. (2012). “A Patrimony for the Children”: Low-Income Homeownership and Housing (Im)Mobility in Latin American Cities. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102, 1489-1510.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.628260